Viewing posts under:
Lakshya Jain
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Primary Recap: Wisconsin
Primary Recap Wisconsin voters decided the first round of this year’s nonpartisan state Supreme Court election on Tuesday. Judges Janet Protasiewicz (a liberal) and Dan Kelly (a conservative) will advance to a hotly-contested April general election in one of the nation’s top swing states. Although Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates have no formal partisan affiliations, coalitions…
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Another State Supreme Court Battle Brews In Wisconsin
Introduction Few states are as politically divided as Wisconsin, which voted for former President Trump in 2016 by a mere 23,000 votes, and for President Biden in 2020 by an even narrower 20-thousand vote margin. Federally, Wisconsin is one of just a handful of states that elected a bipartisan senate duo to Washington. In the…
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How Has The US Senate Managed To Stay Competitive?
The 2024 Senate map is conventionally challenging for Democrats. Republicans need just two seats to flip the chamber, while Democrats must defend 23. Eight of the states that they are defending were more Republican than the nation in 2020 and three (Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio) backed President Trump twice while voting more than ten…
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Did Refusing The COVID-19 Vaccine Cost The GOP Any Elections?
Vaccination has historically not been something that diverges along partisan lines in the United States. Until recently, both parties showed roughly equal rates of vaccine enthusiasm and skepticism alike, and Donald Trump’s administration was actually the one that launched Operation Warp Speed, which led to the rapid development of the extremely effective mRNA vaccines that…
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Our 2022 Senate Wins Above Replacement Model
During the course of our 2022 postmortems, we at Split Ticket have already quantified the importance of candidate quality in the House of Representatives elections. Today, we extend our model to the 2022 US Senate elections, where the disparities in candidate strength were even more striking. The story of how the Democrats kept the Senate…
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Electability, Ideology, and the 2022 Midterms
At Split Ticket, we have repeatedly proven that candidate-driven effects fundamentally impact election results, but we have not completely addressed a more controversial question: do ideologically-extreme candidates pay electoral penalties? Previous analysis on the correlation between moderation and overperformance suggests that they do. Today’s piece hints at a more profound claim: electability was a bigger…
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Introducing Split Ticket’s Congressional Voting Index (CVI)
INTRODUCTION Split Ticket’s new Congressional Voting Index (CVI) gauges each House district’s partisan lean. In contrast to counterparts like Cook PVI, our CVI uses a unique methodology that makes it more representative of the current electoral climate. This tool will improve our 2024 House ratings by shedding light on how seats may be expected to…
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Our 2022 House Wins Above Replacement (WAR) Model
>>> Jump to WAR Table Our 2020 House wins-above-replacement (WAR) model showed that spending still matters in American politics. Among other things, the new 2022 edition proves that candidate quality, or the lack thereof, can fundamentally impact competitive races. Controversial contenders paid a bigger penalty across the board this cycle than they did in 2020.…
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Election Denial Is Really Unpopular
The 2020 election was unique for a variety of reasons. Chief among them, however, was the false contention from the (losing) Republican camp that they had actually won. In the wake of the election, former president Donald Trump propagated a wave of lies regarding the results and refused to back down on them, making them…
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Estimating 2022’s Generic Ballot
INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the 2022 cycle, one political truism benefited Republicans above all else: the out party had gained ground in all but three midterms since 1862. During that time frame, the House of Representatives had changed hands in 13 such cycles, with the presidential party often suffering double-digit losses. The GOP did…